Maybe my ID card says I am 22 but I had an early start on programming than most of my peers, so just treat me as a 40-year-old since I have some decades-old die-hard habits accumulated already.
My first language ever learned is C actually, and then I spent almost 10 years tackling Visual Basic from version 3 up to .net framework 4.0, before I made the switch to Objective-C on OS X. Objective-C seemed to me like an almost perfect mix of C and Visual Basic .net (which is more or less a dialect of C#, which in turn is heavily influenced by Java) so my mind adapted to it very quickly. Swift 1.0 seemed unusable to me. It is too fragile, have functionalities missing, and is very confusing to use. Having to carry a 8MB runtime library with the resulting binary is also a big kicker. Swift 2.0 seemed a lot more useable to me and the fragility of Swift 1.x is gone. I will look into using that in some of my projects, and probably create some projects with that. HOWEVER if I am creating a library or a framework I will still use Objective-C as it is able to be more stable and use less dependency. > On Jun 13, 2015, at 11:56, Roland King <r...@rols.org> wrote: > > >> On 13 Jun 2015, at 10:32, Carl Hoefs <newsli...@autonomy.caltech.edu> wrote: >> >> Okay, so now there's Swift. Ugh. At first glance it looks like a throwback >> to Basic (let x =), so it make me shudder. I suppose I'll hold my nose and >> learn it, but the main question would be why? Is there some glaring >> irredeemable deficiency in Obj C that will end its days? I don’t recall >> anyone clamoring for a new language… > > There were many. I saw many and increasing numbers of posts expressing utter > frustration with learning objective C in order to program for Apple OS. Whole > industries have grown up making it possible to program iOS (for instance) in > other languages, a lot of them suck. > >> >> What problem/issue/deficiency is Swift intended to address? The mindset I >> use when programming in Obj C is “pure and simple object orientation”. What >> mindset am I to adopt in learning Swift? I’m having a hard time getting a >> “feel” for Swift's orientation. It seems so… syntaxy. >> > > My 2c, one problem that Swift is intended to address is that computer > science, programming and compilers have moved on and the skillset and > expectations of newly minted programmers is for languages with the kind of > expressibility and features which Swift was designed for. What do people who > learn to program these days learn, at university, or in their bedrooms on > Sunday afternoons? I don’t know but I don’t think it’s C any more, it’s Java, > and Haskell and a host of others. I’ve been doing lots of embedded > programming the last year (Nordic BTLE stuff, in C, ARM Cortex) and I’m > sometimes flabbergasted by the questions and posts I see on the dev forums > there, people who are completely clueless about C programming, they just > don’t get it. If you read enough of these posts you start to see that their > expectation of what a programming language is and what it gives you is > different. > > Before I decided that working for a living was getting dull I worked at a > financial firm which had its own in-house financial modelling system. A very > good one, a very powerful one, somewhat dated and mostly written in C and > C++, but a clear competitive advantage. I know quite a few people who left > over the last few years and were lured to other shops to basically rebuild > this system. None of them are doing it in C and C++, they’re doing it in > python and Haskell (and one lot in C# but I don’t fancy their chances). Why, > because those languages and the patterns they use are what the programmers in > the market know. > > I believe that many programmers who learned their skills recently find ObjC, > and C, clunky throwbacks to a bye-gone age. They find them hard to learn, > verbose to program in and (again IMO) don’t do it very well. Bad, > inefficient, sloppy, security-hole filled code results from those who aren’t > turned right off the platforms in the first place. Something new was needed > to transition eventually away from ObjC for the most part and let tomorrows > programmers get on with the job of writing applications in the kind of > typesafe, rich programming languages they’ve grown up with. > > I had a rocky start with Swift. No disrespect to the team but V1.0 was > incomplete, the tools were a complete horror show and although it did > interoperate with ObjC it had so much friction that I found it much slower to > use and I dropped it for the little Apple OS stuff I was doing the last year. > I returned to it over the last couple of weeks, have been impressed so far > with Swift 2.0, not just the stability but the intelligent improvements to > the language and the almost unbelievable amount of work which must have been > done to the entirety of Cocoa to ‘Swiftify’ it. This years WWDC videos have > been super thus far (who’s the guy did the Improving Your Existing Apps With > Swift, he was great) and the tone’s different. Last year I felt it was ‘Swift > is here, your grandmother could use it, here’s how it works, off you go”. > This year, with the benefit of 12 months of bug reports and real-world > experience of the problems people have had they are more how to think in > Swift, best design practices for using it and much more practical. > > I’m a way away from being great at Swift, I still need to think more about > protocols and extensions and value types, but I’m getting better, but I > certainly see the potential power of it and can do a half-decent job of using > it. It’s going to get only better, so am I. > >
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